SUICIDAL IDEATION
When I initially decided to start this mental health blog, I sent the first chapter to an ex boyfriend of mine who’s an author and publisher to get his literary expertise, as well as an opinion as someone who knows me quite well. He told me it was brilliantly written, but asked me if I thought people deserved to know me so intimately and have that much access to my vulnerability. I thought about that long and hard, and I’m still thinking about it today.
Even as I’m writing this.
Let’s preface this by saying that I hate pity. I detest it. It actually heightens whatever it is I was initially feeling, and a sure guarantee to make me feel worse. So let’s not send me those messages.
Here’s the part of mental illness and my Bipolar 2 diagnosis that gets confusing: In a matter of hours I have gone from one extreme contrasting emotion to the next– and both are very much genuine. I thought that there should be a build up between them. I don’t even know how this thing works anymore, if it’s mutating or evolving, but all I know is I’m deathly afraid this will take my life.
Twelve hours ago I was on stage in front of hundreds of people, singing my songs, feeling on top of the world, laughing after the show, dancing, listening to music with Rob, posting on Instagram. Genuinely happy.
Now, not one wink of sleep, laying in this tour bus bunk imagining that this was my lifeless body beneath the ground, and I could just rest once and for all, and feel nothing. In less than 24 hours, my whole reality is in question. I’m in a dark hole wondering how will I even get out of this bunk to face anyone and hide how much pain I’m in.
How will I hide how alarming and scary what I’m feeling really is and that I feel like I’m dying. How long will it last for this time? The tour is ending in two days, and I will now have to go home and be alone. Where it’s easier to hide but harder to get help. Where if something were to happen, no one would know.
This is a constant reality I’m growing weary of. That all help feels temporary. I feel each time I go through this cycle, a part of me dies and I’m drifting farther and farther away from reality and becoming more disconnected with everything around me. I will see others smiling, laughing and living, and I’d find myself yearning to feel what that feels like, then I’d try to remember the last time I felt truly alive. Normally I’d have a vault full of memories to jolt me back to reality, but these days it’s getting harder, because I cannot remember the last time I felt that– Alive.
Darkness is a tricky and interesting thing. The deprivation of light is one of the most fucked up, yet accurate analogies of what this human experience is like. Most people fear the dark. And with good reason. It’s terrifying. Your eyes, there to navigate danger, become your handicap without light. Stumbling around in the unknown is horrific. Hence the most terrifying nightmares and horror movies are set in the dark.
But here is where it becomes a mind fuck.
If you stay in the dark long enough, your eyes begin to adapt, and though you may still be terrified and want nothing more than the light, light becomes the enemy now to your eyes.
How can I adapt to something that I’m terrified of? It’s the same concept with the frog in the boiling water. Its body temperature keeps acclimating to the boiling water as the temperature rises, and before it’s aware, it’s dead.
That makes me wonder. Am I simply acclimating to the darkness as I go around in these cycles, deluding myself that I’m getting better? Or am I actually getting better? Thoughts of death as a relief do not scare me anymore, matter of fact, they are comforting.
What terrifies me now is that it’s not terrifying. The journey to feeling nothing is scary. Because the only thing you feel is the absence of the presence of emotions. Wanting to feel–knowing you should be feeling–is the kind of pain that’s indescribable.
The reality is. I think about death way more than I think about living. And before you think that I’m thinking about ways to end my life, no that’s not what I mean.
Death. Like actual death. The peaceful parts. The parts where suffering is no more. The parts where tiredness is no more. The stillness. No more racing thoughts, losing control and helplessness.
A lot of people are scared to admit that they think about death as a fantasy of relief because we’re made to feel like it’s weak to think that way. The one thing that’s inevitable and guaranteed. Death.
Yet, somehow, there is no shame in believing all the unrealistic fantasies we conjure to give ourselves that same fantasy of relief, which by the way is fully supported by society. Shit that ain’t even real. Hollywood.
I think about Robin Williams a lot. I think about how the world watched him make jokes, laughed, and even laughed with him as he provided relief from their own pain and realities, and one seemed to have noticed that he was losing the light in his eyes. I cover mine a lot lately. Because while the darkness is terrifying and I hope to be rescued, a harsh bright light now feels even more painful.
How I see it. There are two choices.
We wait for the fate of the boiling frog, or we find the light, then retrain our eyes to embrace it again.
Though I don’t have a road map to the latter, I choose it. I’m still fighting everyday, stumbling around in the dark waiting to find my light again. Then hope for the strength to re-adapt to light. Because when there’s light, I still get to see beauty. And that makes it worth it.
